About

Fanta Commercial Parodies refer to a series of spoofs and remixes based on a series of Japanese adverts for the Coca-Cola brand soft drink Fanta. The quirky-ness of these commercials helped inspired these remixes during the first few months on the video-sharing sharing site Nico Nico Douga.

Origin

The promotional campaign for the flavored soft drink Fanta, titled “Fanta School: Teacher Series” (ファンタ学園 先生シリーズ, Fanta Gakuen Sensei Series) began airing on television stations in Japan and South Korea during 2002 to 2004,[1] which showcased a cast of teachers with unique personalities, along with the opening of each advert being a parody to the famous Japanese drama series Kinpachi-sensei.[2] The campaign was positively received during it’s airing, winning the gold prize at the ACC CM Festival for three consecutive years.[3] A compilation of these commercial would be sharing online via YouTube as early as July 2006,[4] and would also be subtitled (shown below), and uploaded on August 11th, 2006, where it would receive over 2.1 million views in just seven years.

Spread

Half a year later, these commercials would then be uploaded to Nico Nico Douga for the first time on March 10th, 2007.[5] Eventually, one of the first known parodies would be created Nico Nico Douga user ryuun, using scenes from the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, (shown below) and uploaded it two weeks later, on March 24th, 2007.[6] The video would received over 140,000 views, and helped inspired other users to create parodies by using recut scenes from various anime series.

Users also began creating hand-drawn parodies of the adverts, after a video featuring the characters of the Touhou Project series (shown below) was created by user 4×1000, and uploaded on September 18th, 2007,[7] where it would become the most popular in the series, amassing over 1.5 millions since it’s upload. Since then, over 300 videos relating the series has since been uploaded Nico Nico Douga[8] of November 2013.

Western Appeal

Additionally, these commercials have also been featured in a number of online blogs throughout the years, including Serious Eats[9] in 2008, and on Japan Central[10] in 2012, mainly due to the English-speaking web’s fascination to weird Japanese commercials.